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A powerful account of how authoritarian leaders make cruelty, exclusion, and repression appear morally justified.
Across democracies and autocracies alike, a growing form of authoritarian control uses moral slogans and patriotic scripts to quash dissent. Leaders increasingly justify repression in the moral defense of families, children, values, or the nation itself.
In The Autocrat’s Playbook, Baris Cayli Messina introduces the “moral trap,” a novel framework that reveals how authoritarian regimes around the world use morality to create fear, stigmatize activists, criminalize dissent, and ultimately isolate people from one another. Drawing on historical and contemporary cases ranging from Nazi Germany and Maoist China to apartheid South Africa, Putin’s Russia, and the Trump-era United States and beyond, Messina shows how autocrats consolidate their power and manufacture obedience by reshaping what people believe is right, normal, and worthy. Timely and provocative, The Autocrat’s Playbook offers a bold new way of understanding how social and political repression works and how collective resistance survives.
Baris Cayli Messina is Professor at the School of Social and Political Sciences, University of Lincoln; Editor-in-Chief of the International Social Science Journal; and author of A Slow Revolution, Queer Under Siege, and Violence and Militants.
"To silence and repress dissenters and the righteous, autocrats implacably invert the ethical order, making truth a lie and virtue a crime. This is superbly and frighteningly exposed in The Autocrat’s Playbook through harrowing cases across the contemporary Orwellian world we inhabit. A much-needed study of authoritarianism.”—Didier Fassin, Professor, Collège de France
“Baris Cayli Messina shows us how antidemocratic logic operates under the disguise of virtuousness. This authoritarian camouflage convinces many people of the need for violence, repression, occlusion, and isolation. Cayli Messina invites us to think further, beyond current explanations of the ongoing attacks against democracy.”—Federico Finchelstein, author of The Wannabe Fascists
“Compellingly demonstrates that political domination isn’t realized only, or even predominantly, through force and repression. Rather, autocrats exert their hold through more insidious moral traps that demonize and isolate populations. By presciently exposing architectures of domination and then furnishing crucial insight into strategies of resistance that have undermined such systems, Cayli Messina offers a powerful gift: our counter-playbook for alarmingly autocratic times.”—David Cunningham, Professor of Sociology, Washington University in St. Louis
“A clearly written and absorbing study of how autocrats appropriate the language of morality to divide societies. It has never been more important to understand how they create fear and stigmatize, criminalize, and isolate their enemies.”—Ruth Ben-Ghiat, author of Strongmen: Mussolini to the Present